It's been a few weeks since we last posted a Weekly News. Partly because the summer months are quieter, but also because normal writer Ian Butler has been short of time. So this week i am stepping into to fill the gap, let's see how it goes.

PCM Daily Expansion Pack: Update In The Works

If you've been reading the PCM.Daily Projects sub-forum you might have seen some posts hinting at a new update for the expansion pack. Well now we can confirm that a small post-Vuelta update is coming! It will contain: a post-Vuelta stats update, bug fixes and some othr surprises. Details are being closely guarded for the moment so keep an eye out for more information in the next week or two.

Ian Butler Stepping Down

Yesterday one of the newest Admins, Ian Butler, announced that he would be stepping down from his Admin position. First brought to the Admins attention last week he made a short statement in Cafe Pedro 9. It's a shame to see him go and we will miss his input on the Weekly News, Story Spotlight and other projects he helped around with.

Story of the Month: August

No official competition was held for August, but Mre did pick out winners for both the Main and New Story competitions.

Story of the Month: Il Bimbo d'bronzo by Re Leone

New Story of the Month: The 1980's by zuff

Both stories had great months and made real advances. Re Leone joins the elite club of writers who have won both the New and Main Story awards.

ManGame Madness

The ManGame has been on a string of races recently. Earlier in the week we saw Janez Brajkovic take an incredibly close victory, 2 seconds!, over Benat Intxausti and Fabian Duarte in the Tour of Vancouver.

At C2 level a terrific Tour de Bretagne saw Timothy Duggan victorious ahead of Wilson Marentes and Grega Bole. This race showing off that lower levels can mean better action.

Finally the ProTour is back in action! Francesco Ginanni of Pokerstars.com took a shock win in La Fleche Wallone. Simone Ponzi and Yuri Trofimov completed the high quality podium. Up next is La Doyenne and it is guaranteed to deliver action.

Story Games Progress

The Story Games sub-section saw some huge progress this week. Firstly the ICL, run by Bikex, completed its Vuelta a Espana. The final GT of the opening season saw a great battle between Purito and Froomebot, with the Brit taking the honors late on. The first season of the ICL is drawing towards a close but there is still some action to witness.

EPIC also passed a big milesone. After a whole month, and a false start, the Tour de France rolled down the Champs Elysees. One of the greatset Tours in history delivered in every aspect! A GC battle to rival Lemond-Fignon saw Quintana and Froome go toe-to-toe until the very final ascent on Stage 20. The Points Jersey was decided by a single point, on the Champs! In between was non-stop action. Go and catch up in the Tour de France Thread credits to Cycleman for reporting

Thread of the Week

Finally we come to Thread of the Week. It's been busy on Dail with the Vuelta drawing lots of discussion. Also the Tour of Britain and Canadian Classics have seen the Other Races thread plenty busy. But i have to give the award to Other sports on PCM for being neither about PCM or Sports... But it was the funniest thread of the year so far, guaranteed!

After some pause we come up today with another edition of cycling interviews.
This time we had the chance to ask Joe Eldridge some questions, he is currently riding for the Team Novo Nordisk. Please click read more to see the full interview.

A small patch has been released for the PCM.daily Expansion Pack, fixing the following things:

- A few bug fixes concerning equipment not showing up
- 3 new sponsors (Kleenex, Skype and Veltins)
- Several bug fixes
- Stat changes

You will of course always need to have installed V1 via the torrent download. Both the V1 and this patch can now be downloaded from our Downloads section.

Update 26/08: The V1.2 file has now replaced V1.1, containing bug fixes and stat changes

(written by haasje33)

The first version of PCM.daily's Expansion Pack for PCM 14 is now finally here.

As you all know, a few members have joined the DB team of PCM.daily for this project, but also for future projects. Zecha, bwiggins, Sykkel_Freak, Kentaurus and haasje33 accompanied Jesleyh, Alakagom, Maddrengen, admirschleck and Jacky Durand to work on this huge project.

The database comes with 101 teams, all with fully updated rosters. You will also find a lot of new equipment and the full rider palmares of 2013.

Also, we have included a lot of other important stuff to the database. The database now has over 300 races, for instance. Another thing to mention is that we have added nearly 400 new sponsors.

Thanks to Alakagom and Jesleyh, we have more realistic stats than ever. They developed an adjusted stat matrix and adjusted a lot of stats.

Lastly, it's also worth mentioning that we've been improving the generation of young riders. We started with this in the previous database (2014DB for PCM2013) and with Kentaurus joining the team, we were able to make this even more realistic.

Convinced? Well, go straight to the download here .

A mirror link will be available soon.

As always, a huge thank you to the community for providing shirts, equipment and stages - and a special shout out to all members of the PCM.daily DB team, who worked on this project: admirschleck (graphics), bwiggins (equipment), haasje33 (graphics, cdb work and coordination), Jacky Durand (sponsorkits), Jesleyh (stats and other cdb work), Kentaurus (XML-files and cdb work), Maddrengen (graphics), Sykkel_Freak (cdb work) and Zecha (logos and other graphics).

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The PCM.daily DB team will now move on to the V2 which will probably include some bug fixes, as well as a few new features: all sponsorkits by Jacky Durand implemented, cyclist contracts, additional variants and more…
Releasing a small update for PCM 13 is still being considered by the DB team, so we'll see about that.

The PCM Daily fantasy betting goes into the last part of the season obviously. At the moment it looks like a fight between SotD and rastaff, who both have made sensational bets this season and created a nice gap to the next.

With the Vuelta a Espana lots of new bets have been opened and might decide over the 2014 PCM Daily Betting champion. Next to the typical GC, stage and jersey odds, we also offer some head to head bets.

But the Vuelta is not the only race on the schedule! With the Vattenfall Cyclassics we have another bet up. Don`t ignore the race as the startlist deserved a bet obviously. Lots of sprinters will be at the start to fight for the win.